Apify

Worked through Apify's pricing page, Store, and both major review bases on 2026-10-26. We haven't deployed a paid plan, so nothing below is hands-on — it's an operator's desk evaluation of where this platform earns its keep and where it burns budgets.

Apify is the default answer to "I need this website's data every morning." The Store holds 99,000+ Actors — serverless scrapers and automations you rent per run. The heavy hitters are serious infrastructure at this point: the Google Maps Scraper shows 667K users, Instagram 450K, TikTok 362K. You schedule an Actor, it lands in a dataset, you export to Sheets or pipe it into an agent through the MCP server. Free tier gives you $5 of usage monthly, no card. That part is as advertised.

The Catch

The sticker is a floor. Your $19 Starter plan includes $19 of prepaid credit — and then the meters start: the Actor's own fee (per event, per usage, or both), compute units at $0.20 each, residential proxies at $8/GB, storage and data transfer, and add-ons like $5 per concurrent run. A scraping-heavy week can clear the prepaid credit in days and roll into pay-as-you-go without a hard stop. This isn't our guess — pricing issues are the loudest cons category on G2 (88 mentions, ahead of anything else), and a October 2026 Trustpilot reviewer flatly describes pay-as-you-go adding up once review volumes scale. The second tax is learning: 58 G2 mentions of learning difficulty. The Store makes running an Actor look like one click, but picking the right Actor, tuning its inputs, and estimating its per-run cost is genuinely technical work. Who wastes money here: non-technical buyers who estimate from the sticker and skip the $5 dry run. Run everything on Free for a week first, and log CU plus proxy consumption per Actor before upgrading.

What it actually costs

Where it fits

Apify is a marketplace with a meter on every shelf. That's the right trade for teams whose whole product depends on web data — you're paying to never maintain a scraper again. If your need is one narrow feed (SERP tracking, for example), a single-purpose API like SearchApi is cheaper to reason about; if your automation lives mostly in spreadsheets and forms, Teable or NoCodeAPI solve smaller problems at smaller bills. Review sentiment is unusually strong for this niche — 4.8 on Trustpilot against Bright Data's 4.3 — which tells you the marketplace layer, not the proxy pricing, is what people are paying for.

Pick an Actor, not a plan. The plan follows from the Actor's appetite.